American Historical Association
Chicago, IL
January 8-11, 2026
Proposal
The Roman de la Rose was the most popular secular work in the European Middle Ages, with over 300 extant copies, 146 of which are in the Roman de la Rose Digital Library (RDL). The size of the corpus allows the Rose to serve as an intriguing window into late medieval manuscript production and economies of culture. I am particularly interested in exploring trends in illustration, text density, and parchment color to situate the Rose as an object of economic value over place and time. I have used the RDL over the past decade to experiment with data visualization and computational image analysis, focusing on the evolution of my approach as new technologies have become available and more accessible. The RDL publicly shared codicological and manuscript data, which I synthesized and expanded to create an interactive visualization of the extant corpus. The next evolution of the project used Imageplot software to visualize a sample of 9000 manuscript images and visualized them over time by saturation level as a way to see trends in parchment and color density over time. The project continued to evolve as I developed a recommender system for the images through the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) – something we now simply call AI. The programming threshold for doing this work was high, so the work stalled until the February 2025 launch of Distant Viewing Explorer, a browser-based interface for object detection and other ways of exploring large sets of images with AI, which is reinvigorating the project. I am experimenting with computer vision on manuscript images and will next retrain the network to work better with medieval manuscripts. All research necessarily evolves as new opportunities become apparent and technologies arise. This project is intentionally emblematic of that process, as it builds on an earlier digital humanities project and engages with a particularly fast-developing computational methodology.
This presentation is part of the following panel:
An Evolution of Digital Research: Methods, Limitations, and Dissemination
gital historians and digital humanists alike face challenges in an evolving digital landscape. With the ground constantly moving, new technologies emerging, and the loom of artificial intelligence, scholars are exploring new and old ways of examining the past. The panel will reflect on a range of past, current, and future practices of digital tools and methods. This session explores the evolution of digital research whether that evolution has happened at a field, individual, or national level, digital methods have changed in scope and availability. From podcasting to network analysis and image analysis to 3D models and AR viewing technology, this panel showcases how both individuals and fields of study have evolved in the digital age. Jesse Draper, will introduce the panel and the topic and then each panelist will have around 10-15 minutes to speak. Jim Ambuske considers the transformation of podcasting from interview programs to publicly engaged immersive soundscapes. This evolution raises several critical methodological and ethical questions about how historians can and should present history using this medium. In a similar vein, Marissa Knaak will explore how 3D and AR models can be used in communicating with public audiences and considering the use of space over a long period of time. She will focus on the uses of 3D and AR models for analyzing space to inform research on public spaces at the turn of the twentieth century. Gillian Macdonald and Kristen Mapes will explore the evolutions in personal and field wide research using continually evolving digital technologies. Macdonald highlights the evolution of early modern British research and digital methods that has had some growing pains especially in national histories. On this she will reflect on her own work as it has evolved to include networking techniques to better understand relationships in the early modern world. Kristen Mapes will show how opportunities for the study of medieval manuscripts have developed to encompass interactive visualizations of descriptive metadata to the application of computer vision for object detection and illustration analysis. Emily Elliot will round out the panel discussion with managing a large digital project and its impact in uncertain times. She will then talk about the challenges with hosting and how that has evolved over time.